So now we have a concept to bring together trees and three-dimensional ‘line drawings’, the first thing to do to develop the design is choose the trees.

I knew I wanted to use mature trees so they would look great from the moment they were planted rather than waiting years for them to grow.  I visited different nurseries and fell in love with a beautiful ornamental cherry tree – Prunus Serrula in latin (below).

What I love about them is they look wonderful all year round, even in the depths of winter with their stunning shiny papery red bark. Pretty delicate white blossom in spring, lush green leaves in summer and yellowing, orange, red leaves in autumn. They’re not too big, have multiple sculptural trunks and over all seem like a good partner for a linear stainless-steel sculpture.

I chose five of them for the art installation, imagining they would make a wonderful visual impact as a group. They are already 18 years old and about 4m tall but can grow up to 6m tall.

For the design process I had each tree 3D scanned. They do this with a camera (main image), taking hundreds of photographs from different directions and use special software to build a 3D map of the shape (below). The technology doesn’t capture the leaves or the very fine branches, but that was ok because I only really needed the main trunks to design the sculptures.

Once I had the digital models I 3D printed them at a scale of 1:20, which is about 15-20cm tall (below).  Having models of the actual living trees picked for the project was really important because their individual characters could influence the sculptural drawing shapes and we could be confident of what the whole composition would look like – rather than guessing.

The next step…is figuring out where they should go in Ebbsfleet Green.